Table of Contents
Every site we maintain has a front desk in front of it. The front desk is a service called Cloudflare. When someone visits your site, the front desk hands them a copy of your pages instead of calling the back office every time. That is why pages open fast and junk traffic never reaches you.
The copy is also the catch. When it drifts from the real site, the site still looks normal to you. A patient, a buyer, or a member of the congregation somewhere sees something else.
These are the four things we check whenever a setting at the front desk changes.
1. An instruction that gets overruled
What you would see: we asked the front desk to always fetch a fresh copy of certain pages, such as the login page, yet those pages still come out stale.
Why: the front desk reads its instructions as a list, and when two instructions cover the same page, the one lower in the list wins. A careful exception can be cancelled by a general rule sitting below it.
What we check: the order of the list, then a test request to a page that must never be copied. The reply has to say BYPASS, not HIT.
2. A form that fails for some customers a day later
What you would see: a day or so after a change, a few callers say your appointment or enquiry form “did nothing”. You try it yourself and it works.
Why: your site stamps every form with a security pass that expires after about a day. If the front desk keeps a copy of the page longer than that, every visitor is handed the same expired pass. The page looks fine, the form submits, and the site quietly refuses it.
What we check: pages with forms, carts, or logins are kept out of the copied set, or the pass is fetched fresh on each visit. We compare the pass in the copy against a fresh one.
3. Old pages that linger after moving to a new server
What you would see: the site moved to a new server and the copies were cleared, yet some visitors still see the old version for days.
Why: there is more than one copy. The front desk holds one, the server itself holds another, and each visitor’s browser holds a third. Clearing one leaves the other two serving the old site.
What we check: clear from the server outward, then watch one fresh request come back as MISS and the next as HIT on the new content.
4. Photos that vanish from Google, while WhatsApp previews look fine
What you would see: your clinic, showroom, or product photos stop appearing in Google Images, but every link shared on WhatsApp or Facebook still shows a perfect preview. Nobody notices for months.
Why: the front desk has a setting meant to stop other websites from stealing your images. Google Images fetches your photos the same way a thief would, so Google gets turned away too. Chat apps fetch differently and slip through, which hides the problem.
What we check: whether image search matters for the site. If it does, the setting stays off or carries an allow-list, and we confirm with a test fetch.
After any change
One form submission and four test requests cover all of the above. A few minutes, on every site we maintain, every time a front-desk setting moves.
These checks are part of the standard annual maintenance on every Passion in Design site.
